Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our names, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Gilbert Doctorow.
He lives in Brussels and is an analyst, especially of America's relationship and Europe's relationship with Russia.
His latest book is called Does Russia Have a Future?
And here he's got one.
Well, his website is gilbertdoctorow.com.
And this one's reprinted at antiwar.com.
The 2019 European Parliamentary Election Prospects for Peace.
Welcome back to the show, Gilbert.
How are you doing?
Well, thanks for having me.
Yeah, good to have you here.
And I'm really grateful to see your analysis of this extremely complicated topic, the European Parliamentary Elections that just took place here, where you have all these different countries in play and all these different sets of politics.
Trying to fit within the simple narratives of analysts on all sides.
So I was hoping you could go ahead and make it complicated for us and tell us what happened and what does it all mean?
Well, I understand it could be difficult to make sense out of it.
There are 751 seats in the European Parliament pending the departure of the Brits, which will take away about 10% of that.
And there are two big blocks, that is groups of parties which act in alliance.
And they are a center right and a center left.
And they have controlled the agenda of the legislature, the European Parliament, for the last, most of the last 40 years.
And they do that by agreeing on coalition, or sharing power in the assignment of commissioners, that is the executive of the European institutions.
The Parliament itself does not have the right of initiative, that is, it does not start, begin legislation.
But it does have a voice.
It does use that voice to express the disposition of the legislators of all the European countries, all 28 of them at the present, on any given issue.
The block of right and the block center left are called the Alliance of Democrats and Socialists.
That is, as you would imagine, the left.
And the European People's Party, which is the party dominated by the single biggest component in that, the Germans.
That is the party of Anglo-America.
Now, they have enjoyed, as I said, control over the appointment of commissioners.
They also have had a very big role to say in the appointment of the president of the commission.
Now, putting aside those two, which have accounted for something above 50%, maybe between 50 and 60% of all of the seats in the parliament, you had a great many different parties that joined in other little coalitions.
It's very hard for an outsider to understand at once, or even after a little initiation, how all this fits together.
The main thing, though, is to appreciate that it is not as difficult to manage as it might seem having so many fragmented parties.
Because the European Parliament, which is often described to people who are outside the situation, as the voice of the people, the answer to the bureaucratization of European institutions.
Because so many functionaries, so many of these executive appointments are just that, they're appointments.
They have not come from a vote of the people.
And that is said to be what makes European institutions so far removed from the wishes of the people.
But that is unfortunately not really the whole story.
The whole story is that the European Parliament is a top-down organization.
That is to say, it is run very tightly.
You have congressional leaders in the U.S. Congress who run through the legislation on behalf of a president.
You have these whips of the Tories and the liberals and so forth in the U.K.
Parliament who keep discipline among the party members.
But the fact is that the European Parliament has a super whip.
The European Parliament meets in two places.
Mostly it has discussions and committee meetings in Brussels.
And it has its votes on legislative bills or resolutions, which take place in Strasbourg.
The parliamentarians go back and forth between the two cities.
When they have the votes, you can have 300 pieces of legislation or resolutions that are voted on within one day.
To call that a free and open parliament is to misunderstand completely what freedom is about.
These are disciplined.
Most of the parliamentarians have not read most of what they're voting on.
They were given lists by their party bosses, how to vote on this, that, and the next one, as they pull their levers in electronic voting in a very quick succession.
So the European Parliament is not a very democratic institution and does not have many debates.
And what debates it has are strictly controlled by the center of the coalition of left and right, who decide who gets microphone time.
These are the working rules before we make any appreciation of the elections that just took place.
Nonetheless, there is a disposition in the parliament which has been made, set by this majority.
And they have lost the majority in this most recent vote, mainly on the 26th of May.
Now, losing that majority was something which frightened the status quo mainstream media that we have here.
And they watched like hawks the people whom they thought could upset the apple cart, could be responsible for the majority, the centrist parties losing their majority, and could vote against or hinder the plans for further integration of the European Union.
So all of the media, that is Euronews, which is the most widely watched news program across Europe, and the BBC, they were watching like hawks how Mr. Salvini, who has become the most charismatic leader of the Eurosceptics, of those who are critical of further integration, and who would like to roll back some of the loss of sovereignty that has occurred ever since 1992.
1992, there was the creation of what we now know as the European Union.
It wasn't a union before that.
It was an economic and free trade association, which had increasingly other elements of integration.
But the big sacrifice of sovereignty towards the European central institutions took place in 1992 after a lot of horse trading among the various countries.
Now, this European Union has been called a peace project.
Europe has had a bloody history.
And those who are in favor of creating a United States of Europe, and I can name who those people are, they have said that the sacrifice of sovereignty by individual nations into a collective sovereignty of the Union is itself a peace project because it diminishes nationalist passions that have caused so much trouble in the past in Europe.
The problem with this logic is that the European Union, particularly after it became a union in 1992, has been much more warlike than it was before.
The European Union took part in the savage bombing and military assault on Serbia, and the creation, the carving out of Kosovo in the late 1990s.
Europe had not had any internal invasions and bombing campaigns before.
So, to say that it's a peace project is to miss that this greater integration is headed towards a new European imperialism.
Yeah, I mean, they're saying, hey, look, France and Germany are getting along great now, but they're leaving out the fact that they're picking a fight with the Russians and increasing nationalism there where it really counts.
Exactly.
Everything that has brought us to the hot confrontation that we have with Russia today was the actions of the European Union.
Yes, the United States was behind it, whispering in people's ears, but it was the European Union which put Ukraine in a choice between continuing its relationship with its single biggest trading partner and main banker, Russia, or drop cutting everything and aligning itself not just in terms of trade, but also in terms of foreign policy and in the secret parts of the convention that were being offered to Ukraine militarily as well, that is essentially joining NATO.
So, the European Union provoked, precipitated the crisis in Ukraine that has been since 2014, the main driver of confrontation with Russia.
Now, for this very reason, because of the warlike and Cold War actions of the European Union, I find it really quite shocking to speak about the Union itself as a peace project.
The European Union in its parliament has two-thirds majority that is hawkish, warlike, Cold War ideologues, but it has a one-third minority that has, over the last five years that I have followed this very closely and had meetings with various groups on the right and the left in the European Union parliament, they are, to my experience, quite sensible and fact-finding and looking for some kind of sane relationship with the big neighbor to the east.
In this sense, the European parliament, even in its present form, which is the center is compromised and is forced to look to new allies to maintain a majority, those allies are not healthy allies.
They have been among the most Russia-bashing and irresponsible voices in the European parliament.
They are the ALDE group, which is Alliance of Democrats, of liberals, and the Greens.
Now, in the States, that may sound funny, speaking about Greens as being warlike, because we all know that they're all lovable and fuzzy, and they're trying to save the environment and pass on a surviving planet to our children and grandchildren.
That all sounds wonderful.
But in Europe, the Greens were started in, grew fastest, and are today dominated by the German Greens.
And the German Greens had some very, very radical people as their founders, and people who are and remain to this day, cold warriors.
Joschka Fischer, who was in the German government for more than a decade, and Danny the Red, Cohn-Bendit.
Danny the Red was from the 1969 Paris revolts, one of the student leaders who was most celebrated.
Well, Danny went on to stay on in the Greens, which he helped to found.
And he has been very much a voice for European integration.
But integration meaning European imperialism and its military activity outside of the European theater.
He was a co-author.
Textbook neocons, right?
Former leftists turned Reaganite warmongers.
He arrived at that on his own, but he has made some very, very ugly allies.
He and a guy named Guy Verhofstadt, who is the head of the ALDE party.
Verhofstadt, we all know in the States because he was one of the four people in Europe who were very noisy against Bush's invasion of Iraq.
And Verhofstadt paid a terrible price for that.
He lost his opportunity to become the head of the European Commission because the United States was deeply resentful.
Anyway, Verhofstadt straightened himself out.
He made new friends.
He became a big, big buddy of Kagan in the States, the husband of Newland.
And both he and Danny the Red Cohn-Bendit together wrote a book three years ago and called Stand Up Europe, which is for creating a United States of Europe that will act like the United States of America.
And there's a very big, very big footprint in the world and not a very friendly, not very friendly guys.
So there you have it.
The European Union today in its parliament has a reduced majority of the centrist parties, which are dependent to maintain their control of the agenda in the European Union legislature by alliance with two very vocal, very irresponsible Russia bashing parties.
Sorry, hang on just one second for me.
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All right.
And then, so who's benefited as the centrist?
I guess you're saying it's the centrist slash green alliance is losing out to who?
The right?
No, you've got a center right and a center left who have formed the majority for the last 40 years.
They have lost that majority, but they still are the biggest parties in the parliament.
In order to have a working majority, they have to ally with one or two other large parties that share many of their values.
And these are on the left, the Greens, and on the right, the ALDE party, that's the liberal party, of Kiefer-Hofstadt.
As I come back to the question of the Greens, there is more than one group of Greens in the European Parliament.
And I have known some very decent Greens.
They were called the Nordic Green Left Alliance.
But they are not the people who are running the Greens movement across Europe.
That is the German Greens.
Any political party, which is a universal party, has political positions on much more than anti-nuclear or environmentally friendly and climate change concerns.
There are other points that they have to vote on and have to have positions on.
And as regards foreign policy, the Greens run by the German Greens are quite hawkish.
But now, in these recent elections, we've seen where Marine Le Pen's party beat Macron's party.
You talk about the Flemish, who I guess, you know, that's the Belgian bi-national coalition there.
You have separatists.
How severe is the...
I think you say, though, that...
Well, you just said the party's in power.
The center is holding.
They've lost, but they're still, you know, they've lost some seats and some power.
But they haven't lost control yet.
But is there, in the broader sense, is there a real movement against the European Union overall?
Or how severe is the backlash against it, I guess?
I'll take a step back.
I understand your question, and it's very reasonable.
Because these people who are Euro-skeptics have been slandered by the powers that be, by the centrist parties in control.
They have said that anyone who is against the further integration, which is what we are trying to do by creating a European army, and so on and so on.
And anybody who's criticizing the European institutions wants to demolish the European Union.
That's not what they want, particularly when Mr. Salvini became the intellectual leader of the Euro-skeptic or Euro-critical parties and voices in Western Europe.
Salvini has made it perfectly clear, whereas it hadn't been so clear from Marine Le Pen, where she was coming from.
He's made it perfectly clear he does not want to end the Euro.
He does not want to tear the European Union apart.
He wants to take control of the institutions and change the policies.
Because the policies that have been dictated by the ruling coalition of center-right, center-left, largely policies that came from Berlin, from Anglo-Americo, they were terrible for Southern Europe.
And Italy is Southern Europe.
Spain is Southern Europe.
Even France can be considered Southern Europe.
They are this part of Europe which suffered from the austerity that has plagued Europe since 2008, since the financial crisis.
And so Salvini was saying we want new policies, not new institutions.
We want to take control of the policies.
But again, to put it in a perspective, the United States Congress, when you had a vote on sanctions against Russia, out of 500 congressmen, three would oppose it.
I mean, it reads like the Supreme Soviet, where the party boss says the word and everyone except a few people who are asleep will vote in favor of the motion.
Well, so it has been in states and is today.
In Europe, one-third of the parliament still has kept its brains and independence.
One-third questions these policies, but one-third is not enough to pass a resolution or to stop a resolution.
And there you have the problem.
Well, but do you have a sense that the tide has really shifted?
So you'd expect the next elections to be much like these and for these groups to continue to gain?
It's a little bit early, but there are interesting things that may yet happen.
The Salvini and his, and Marine Le Pen and Gert Wilder in the Netherlands, they form a core of now, it's about 60 votes.
So a little bit less than 10% of the parliament that is Euro skeptic and that wants to change the policies, including the relations with Russia.
But there are a total of maybe 120 people if you put in other small fraction parties who feel the same way.
And there are two big countries that have a Euro skeptic working governments.
One of them is Poland and the other one is Hungary, Mr. Viktor Orban.
Orban is contributing 22 or 25 seats.
His party won, his Fidesz party will be in the new parliament.
And they are likely, very possibly going to realign with the Salvini group.
I say realign because they're presently members of the European People's Party, that is Merkel's bloc.
They have been suspended from that because of supposed violations of rule of law.
And they may leave.
And if they leave and join Salvini, that will be a very big intellectual and political force heading in the right direction as which is what you're asking about.
So there are things that may happen in the next month or two, which will give greater political force to the reasonable minded Euro skeptics, of which Salvini, as I say, is today the intellectual leader.
So we have to watch this space.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time.
I really appreciate having you back on the show here, Gilbert.
Well, thanks, Scott.
It's a pleasure.
All right, you guys, that is Gilbert Doctorow.
He lives in Brussels, a political analyst, obviously based there.
His latest book is called Does Russia Have a Future?
His own website is gilbertdoctorow.com.
And we often reprint what he writes at antiwar.com.
This one is called The 2019 European Parliamentary Election Prospects for Peace.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
You can find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
